Social Media Snippets: Born Digital, Social Media as Customer Service, Vaseline, Spatialkey, Facebook Live Search

Based on extensive original research, including interviews with Digital Natives around the world, Born Digital explores a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical: What does identity mean for young people who have dozens of online profiles and avatars? Should we worry about privacy issues – or is privacy even a relevant concern for Digital Natives? How does the concept of safety translate into an increasingly virtual world? Are online games addictive, and how do we need to worry about violent video games? What is the Internet’s impact on creativity and learning? What lies ahead – socially, professionally, and psychologically – for this generation?

Social media is the new customer service. When social media-driven customer service is combined with the work of citizen marketers, it becomes a force for more credible problem-solving (and less expensive customer service costs). With its inherent market research opportunities, social media has crossed over to the category of obvious strategy. Via churchofthecustomer

Companies have been trying to create their own social networks ever since Friendster became popular. It was part fad and part marketer’s hope that customers were so devoted that they were dying to discuss shampoo or tires online. With a campaign beginning this month, Vaseline is testing a more conceptual approach. Rather than creating an online social network, it is aiming to map the social network of a small town in Alaska. The idea is to show that a new Vaseline lotion, Clinical Therapy, is so effective that the residents of Kodiak, Alaska, passed the word around.

amnesiablog came across this cool application (here)this morning which allows visualization of geo-data. The images below show the spread of Walmart Store openings in the US over the last 45 years. SpacialKey is in Beta at the moment – Sign up and maybe they’ll let you feed in some of your own data

Facebook has just rolled out its implementation of Microsoft Live Search, which allows members of the social network to search the Web without leaving the site. The implementation is fairly straightforward: in the search box on the top right of Facebook, which is also used for quick access to your friends’ profiles and intrasite search, there is now an option to “Search the Web,” which in turn triggers a query of Microsoft Live Search. Results then display within a custom interface designed for Facebook.